Pink-Slipped

What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?

Jane M Gaines

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780252083433
  9780252041815
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050480
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: North American History

Women held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Marion Leonard broke from acting to cofound a feature film company. Gene Gauntier, the face of Kalem Films, also wrote the first script of Ben-Hur. Helen Holmes choreographed her own breathtaking on-camera stunt work. Yet they and the other pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself. A more perplexing event cemented their obscurity: the failure of 1970s feminist historiography to rediscover them. Gaines examines how it happened against a backdrop of feminist theory and her own meditation on the limits that historiography imposes on scholars. Pondering how silent era women have become absent in the abstract while present in reality, Gaines sees a need for a theory of these artists' pasts that relates their aspirations to those of contemporary women. A bold journey through history and memory, Pink-Slipped pursues the still-elusive fate of the influential women in the early years of film.

1

WHAT HAPPENED TO WOMEN IN THE SILENT U.S. FILM INDUSTRY?

“Why did she ever leave the pictures!” laments Epes Winthrop Sargent upon seeing a photograph of actress Gene Gauntier. Quoted in the introduction to Gauntier's 1928 memoir “Blazing the Trail,” Sargent cries out on behalf of a generation of audiences (1928, 4). Four years earlier, in the same vein, a Photoplay article titled “Unwept, Unhonored, and Unfilmed” bemoans the disappearance of Gauntier as well as of Marion Leonard, Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner, Cleo Madison, Flora Finch, and Helen Holmes (Smith 1924). Such a complaint is nothing new to motion picture historiography. “Unwept,” in the best fan magazine tradition, is nostalgia for the forgotten glory of the fading actress and today it could be easily dismissed as nothing more. But buried within the 1924 article are motion picture industry history details seldom found in fan magazine puff pieces. And, as intriguing for film scholars, outbursts of feeling from the women Photoplay interviewed suggest another story, one for a new feminist film moment.

Deep within the article we find evidence that these women put their names behind independent companies in the first decade of the new industry. We learn, for instance, that in 1913 Florence Turner left the Vitagraph Company to form Turner Films, Inc., in London (Smith 1924, 65). Further, we read that in December 1912, Gene Gauntier, along with director Sidney Olcott and her husband Jack Clark, left the Kalem Company and started the independent Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company (ibid., 102).¹ In the same article we are told that Florence Lawrence headed the Victor Company and that Helen Holmes was associated with the Signal Film Company (Smith 1924, 103–104).

Florence Turner, actress/director/producer, Turner Films, Inc., 1913–1917. Courtesy Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Beverly Hills, California.

Over ninety years later, new feminist scholarship tells us what Photoplay did not tell fans in 1924. What Photoplay doesn't say is that Lawrence started the Victor Company with her husband Harry Solterer in 1912 or that Holmes began Signal in 1915 with her director husband J. P. McGowan, followed by the S. L. K. Serial Corporation and Helen Holmes Production Corporation in 1919 (Mahar 2006, 63–65, 118–120). But that is not all. Photoplay doesn't mention comedienne Flora Finch's efforts to start not one but two companies in order to write and to produce her popular action serials—the Flora Finch Company (1916–1917) and Film Frolics Picture Corporation (1920) (Miller 2013a). Marion Leonard is mentioned, but not as the first star actress to start a company, which new research asserts (Mahar 2006, 62). Finally, Photoplay features Cleo Madison as an actress although she also directed and wrote at least ten shorts and two features between 1915 and 1917, the creative high point for women at Universal Films (Cooper 2010, 24; 2013a).² These are only some of many women who were not just actresses in the first two decades when more women held positions of relative power than at any other time in U.S. motion picture industry history.³

Today we have strong evidence to support the assertion that these and other “unwept and unhonored” actresses “did it all”—acting, writing, even editing, sometimes directing, and often producing motion pictures as they attempted to start companies. But here my concern is as much the demise of these enterprising players as it is their ascendance. Their marginalization, shrouded as it is in star nostalgia and cloaked in industry euphemism, is awkward to narrate if we want to answer the question in all of its respects. Because our question—“What happened to them?”—is unlike Photoplay's “Where are they now?” Ours is a several-part question for the intellectual history of a field, distilled when we ask not just “What happened?” but “Why didn't we know?”⁴ We count not one but three disappearances, first from the limelight and second from historical records, the second a function of the first. Then there is the third, effectively a disappearance in a moment when they might have been discovered and therefore the most difficult for another generation to fathom. While we are not surprised that, fifty years before the advent of academic feminism, Photoplay didn't mention key aspects of women's silent-era careers, later generations may wonder why a feminist film historiography did not discover these women in the 1970s.⁵ A comprehensive intellectual history needs to explain why, after the reference to women as silent film directors in one of the earliest issues of Women and Film (Smith 1973, 77–90), the field still largely assumed that there were very few women and that those few were minor figures. One wonders why, when one researcher uncovered the evidence of many more silent-era women directors in the early 1970s, there was neither fanfare nor follow-up.⁶

Flora Finch, actress/producer, Flora Finch Company, 1916–1917; Film Frolics Picture Corp., 1920. Private collection.

Cleo Madison, actress/writer/director, Universal Films, 1915–1917. Private collection.

GENE GAUNTIER: THE RETURN OF THE GIRL SPY

Seven of the actresses Photoplay recalls have a career trajectory in common. They began work early, some as early as 1906–1907, and by the mid-to-late teens all experienced career setbacks. Although some started up again in the late teens and early 1920s, none of these women returned to the top. Summarizing this pattern, a comment in the 1924 Photoplay article can be construed as alluding to the conditions of their opportunity as well as to reversals of fortune. Gene Gauntier is quoted on how much more she once commanded than her image on the screen. Perhaps referring to the changes she felt during her contract work at Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1915, she writes to the Photoplay author: “After being master of all I surveyed, I could not work under the new conditions” (Smith 1924, 102). What does she mean by “master of all I surveyed”? And what were these “new conditions”? Yet more difficult to answer is how opportunity, first grasped, was snatched from these early entrepreneurs. And why did most relinquish power silently while at least one, Florence Lawrence, bemoaned in print, “I WANT so to work!” (ibid., 64).

The easiest answer to the question “What happened to them?” is of course that they went the way of all actresses. They faded and aged. But this fading actually veiled the circumstances of their unemployment, leaving intact the widely held belief that women in the U.S. silent-film industry had been only actresses. Certainly silent-era actresses were numerous and at least two powerful actress-producers were referenced in the earliest historiographical work on the period—Mary Pickford (Ramsaye 1986, 741–751) and Clara Kimball Young (Hampton 1970, 135). But the idea that there were women in the first two decades of the emerging industry more powerful than some men, even, in Gene Gauntier's term, the “master” of others, is a relatively recent one (Smith 1924, 102).⁷ When we look at available sources, what do we find? Gene Gauntier is one of the most well documented of examples, her “Blazing the Trail” telling us how she began as an actress in 1906 at the Biograph Company and by the next year at the Kalem Company was performing her own stunts as well as writing scenarios. Yet even in the published version of her memoir, Gauntier does not give herself credit as codirector or director, or even producer, credit that historians, and she herself, elsewhere asserted. In her memoir, she does not say, as we now do, that with actor-director Sidney Olcott she headed the Olcott-Gauntier unit within the Kalem Company, 1910–1912, or that in 1912, working as a producer with others from the Kalem unit, she started Gene Gauntier Feature Players, which continued for another two years, with the last film to be released The Little Rebel (1915).⁸ Unfortunately, “Blazing the Trail” narrates neither the circumstances under which she left the Kalem Company nor the breakup of Gene Gauntier Feature Players.

In the 1920s, the public record is mostly silent as to “what happened to them?” and for this reason Photoplay's “Unwept” stands out, breaking the silence if only to instill more mystery.⁹ Gene Gauntier seems surprisingly outspoken in the excerpted 1924 letter in which she describes her reaction to changes in the industry as one of “revulsion.” However, Photoplay's placement of the phrase “the beginning of my revulsion” produces some ambiguity (Smith 1924, 102). It is thus difficult to know whether the “disillusionment,” as Photoplay termed it, began in 1912, Gauntier's last year at Kalem, in the Gene Gauntier Feature Players years, 1912–1915, or in 1915, in the last year of her company when she worked temporarily at Universal.¹⁰ And still, Gauntier does not tell us what events took place. Since her remark is not narrated in the excerpt from her 1924 letter, the burden falls on us to interpret her choice of the word revulsion.

In the tradition of narrative history, however, the “what happened?” question calls for interpretation by means of narration. Let us not forget, as well, what Roland Barthes calls the “prestige of this happened” (1986b, 139). It is thus tempting to try to relate events in Gene Gauntier's life as this happened to her, as her “life story.” But storytelling entails smoothing over holes in the evidence, effectively covering them up with plausible explanation. What we narrate is, of course, not the same as the life she once lived, even though we may say that that is what it is. Our telling is rather another ordering of events, one not even remotely corresponding to lived events (for that is impossible), but events arranged after the fact—lined up to confirm an argument we would make about historical trends. And here, still in the “new film history” moment as we are, our strongest argument would rely on an economic explanation, as we will see.¹¹

Using Gauntier's “the beginning of my revulsion” to support the economic argument, we could use this phrase as evidence of how, as early as 1912–1915, a female producer responded to the beginning of industrial changes that extended over the next decade, changes that would buffet about the women who attempted to negotiate more control over the creative process based on their box office successes, especially those who, in a countermove, dared to start their own independent ventures outside companies that were forerunners of the major studios. Looking for evidence to support this argument, effectively a version of “what happened,” we turn back to three documents—a Photoplay interview conducted in 1914 and published in January 1915, a trade press announcement in March 1915, and a private letter written in late June 1915. The 1914 interview with Mabel Condon features Gauntier at home in her New York apartment. Although Jack Clark calls from the studio to ask her advice on a scene, she makes no other mention of current work in the old church they are using for a studio but instead refers “cheerily” to future plans for two companies (Condon 1915, 72). In March, Moving Picture World reports that Gauntier and Clark have rented their New York studio and traveled to Los Angeles to work for Universal (1915, 1942). In late June, Gauntier writes to “Colonel” William Selig: “I wish to make application, in [sic] behalf of my husband, Jack J. Clark, and myself, for an engagement with one of your companies.” Of her importance to the Kalem Company in the 1907–1912 years she writes: “For four years I headed their foreign companies, writing every picture they produced abroad, Mr. Clark playing the leads,—in Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, Italy, Madiera [sic], Gibralter [sic], Algiers, Egypt, and terminating with the taking of From the Manger to the Cross in Palestine. This masterpiece was also conceived, written, and codirected by me as was The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue, The Shaughraun, The Kerry Gow, The Wives of Jamestown, and five hundreds [sic] others.” Written on Gene Gauntier Feature Players, Inc., letterhead, this letter might be read as evidence that the company is in limbo. The New York address on the letterhead is crossed out and replaced with a typed Hollywood street address.¹²

While the interview could be interpreted as the kind of cover story that a player plants in a fan magazine, the letter reads like a job application.¹³ But how much more can we say? To interpret the interview as covering her disappointment or the letter as trying for a comeback is not to solve a mystery but, rather, to fill in the “what happened” blank with our own contemporary hopes and dreams. What we can say is that the evidence points to the split-up of the original Gene Gauntier Picture Players Company. Sidney Olcott is not mentioned as part of it in January 1915, and, most important, we assume that Gauntier would not leave New York and rent out the studio if the company had not failed to secure the capital to bankroll new production. Why did they leave when they had “plans” for their company, and what happened in the ensuing four months in Los Angeles when they made five shorts for Universal?¹⁴ The hole in Gauntier's motion picture career between the last of her Universal shorts, Gene of Northland (1915), and her next, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1919), suggests that her career was over.¹⁵ Does this mean that her “revulsion” that began in 1912 is complete by mid-1915? The evidence that no films were made could be interpreted to mean that she could not find the capital to continue her company, or that the couple could find no other work, or that the work under the “new conditions” was intolerable for someone accustomed to control over so many production aspects (Smith 1924, 102).

Note that we are relying on motion picture film credits as evidence where little else exists. Gene Gauntier exemplifies challenges particular to motion picture historiography—the difficulty of establishing credits for the years before there were credits, of job titles before there were defined jobs, and, of course, of evaluating so many films when only a handful of prints are extant.¹⁶ But since, in Gauntier's case, beyond her few published credits there is relatively more evidence of her career in the fledgling motion picture industry than that of others, we are doubly perplexed. The intellectual history question, “Why didn't we know?” stumps us in another way, one best phrased as: “What happened to what was once known?” That other historical narrative—the intellectual history—requires us to compare how Gene Gauntier was figured in her day in relation to how the first historical accounts of U.S. motion pictures written between 1914 and 1975 referenced her. For if in 1914 she was “equal owner of the enterprise” (Gene Gauntier Feature Players), we want to know why she was gradually demoted in 1926 to synopsis writer for Ben Hur (1907), in 1938 to “daredevil actress,” in 1962 to a “gifted leading woman” who also wrote screen adaptations of classic literature, and finally in 1975 to one of the “first screen scenarists.”¹⁷

It is tempting to say, in answer to the intellectual history “what happened” ques...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Gertrude Stein Wonders about Historians
• Chapter 1. What Happened to Women in the Silent U.S. Film Industry?
• Chapter 2. Where Was Antonia Dickson? The Peculiarity of Historical Time
• Chapter 3. More Fictions: Did Alice Guy Blaché Make La Fée Aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy)?
• Chapter 4. Object Lessons: The Ideology of Historical Loss and Restoration
• Chapter 5. The Melodrama Theory of Historical Time
• Chapter 6. Are They “Just Like Us”?
• Chapter 7. Working in the Dream Factory
• Chapter 8. The World Export of the “Voice of the Home”
• Conclusion: Women Made Redundant
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author